Mike Axelrod’s blog
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For those of you who noticed the links on the left to my photo gallery were broken. They now work. My Gallery2 to Wordpress plugin was out of sync (version wise) for months and I didn’t notice until recently… All fixed now!
A conference ontology for a semantic wiki
Although I was not able to attend the The 7th International Semantic Web Conference ISWC 2008 this year, I felt I was there in spirit. For the past several weeks I have been helping the good people at Ontoprise put together a “Wiki on a stick” to give away at the conference. If you attended you may have picked one of these up. This is very cool, it’s a USB memory stick with a semantic wiki (SMW+) on it. When you plug it in, it launches a customized version of SMW+ with all the conference events and speaker information. I had a lot of fun building the ontology for this. I still can’t get over how fast I can develop a semantically enabled wiki with these tools. If you didn’t get one don’t despair, you can see the online version as longs as it remains up.
Also, it’s not too late to enter the The Ontoprise knowledge engineering contest and win an iPod. Check it out and while you are there you can explore the rest of the SMW Forum site and learn all about SMW+.
RIT will be one of the first Universities in the nation to offer an iPhone related course. One more reason for me to get an iPhone. Hey Jeff, can I sit in on your course?
You know the fun thing about developing applications for hand held devices is you can have these little ego moments with your friends. The ultimate nerd party moment is when you whip out your iPhone or other hand held device and say “hey check this out”. (I had to be careful how I worded that last sentence, snicker) I think back on my long career and to tell you the truth I wrote a lot of code in my time, hardly any of it I can share or show you if we have lunch somewhere or meet at the pub after work. I do like it when computing escapes the desk top and get’s a little freer. Now if I can only figure out how to program these sneakers to run faster…
Two revolutionary discoveries reported in the same month. These are headlines you shouldn’t miss in your lifetime.
It doesn’t get any better than this. Well maybe, now if we can only solve world hunger an end all wars. You think I’m joking? Hey, let’s give it a try.
I am told ClearForest Gnosis is yet another essential power tool for exploration of the Semantic web. Powered by Calais, Gnosis provides real time semantic processing in firefox. Gnosis analyzes page content and highlights (underlines in color) information such as people, organizations, companies, products and geographies. Sort of an auto highliegter for the web. hovering over any of the identified topics, I discovered news, blog entries, maps, company information and Wikipedia entries. Is this useful? I’d say so. A nice feature is that I can configure a list of sites that will be processed automatically. Other pages can be analyzed “on demand” by right clicking on the page or using the keyboard shortcut.
LinkedFacts.com lets me search news articles using semantic web technologies. No this is not a news portal, but I can read the news. What I like about this experiment is that unlike traditional news sites I fell more like I’m in the driver seat. It’s a good idea, with some refinement it might even be a great idea.
This handmade box took me over a year to complete with various stops and starts along the way. It is made of Cherry, Maple and Cocobolo inlay. All the joinery was done by hand. This box started as an exercise in building an 18th century replica during a class taught by Tom Meiller during the winter of 2007. The frame for the lid was shaped using one of Tom’s antique molding planes. Using one of these is an incredible experience and I’m gald I got the chance to try. All the joints are reinforced with either splines or dovetails.
The lid uses special “butterfly” inserts to reinforce the miter joints. These are small hand cut double dovetail shaped pieces of cocobolo that were inlayed after the miter joints were glued up.The course was offered by the Rochester Woodworkers Society where you can also see some of Tom’s Work. Last week I gave the box to my daughter Melanie as a much belated Bat Mitzvah present. (She’s 14 now, so I’m oh so late on this.) Didn’t matter. She loved it.
So my friend Jim asks “Cool, I see you have beer in your title but where’s the beer?”. Answer: Beer is everywhere, yet nowhere. Ok, so no beer really, perhaps “beer talk”. The real question is what do I blog about. Well, woodworking, that’s the wood, Computer “stuff” that’s the silicon, and well, everything else I might want to blog if I was sitting around talking to you and having a beer, “beer talk”. But its not. Its just beer.
It’s interesting to see what happens after you get quoted in computer world. It’s not really that exciting after the intial excitement is over. Mostly you get cold calls by sales people trying to sell you competitive technologies. Please… Anyway the other effect is the follow on interviews by other journalists that want to ride the coat tails of the big press. So I get another 5 minutes of fame in this article from AIS Health.com
Thursday I was quoted in by Computerworld regarding some of my current research at Excellus. I was a guest speaker at a webinar for hosted by Just Systems earlier in the day discussing various aspects of Enterprise mashups and how we might improve customer service by better empowering our service representatives with more powerful client applications. Apparently Heather Havenstein from computerworld was in the audience and wrote up the event in blinding speed. Literally a couple hours after the webinar I got a call from someone in operations telling me I’m in the news. Wow that’s fast.